Learning

               Learning pervades our lives. Among students, learning is involved not only in the mastery of a new skill or academic subject but also in the development of emotions, social interaction and even personality. We learn, for example, to adjust, love, fear, hate and so on. Being aware of the pervasiveness of learning in our lives, we turn to a more systematic discussion of learning.

Learning can be defined as a relatively permanent change in immediate or potential behavior or mental process that results from past experiences or practice.

Behavioral changes that are due to maturation or to temporary conditions of the organism such as fatigue or chemical induced state are not considered learning. All cases of learning are not the same, thus, there are five processes- habituation, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, social learning, cognitive learning process.

The kinds of changes that constitute learning range from the simplest to the most complex. Habituation, the simplest kind of learning, accounts for learning to ignore a stimulus that has become familiar and has no serious consequences. For example, learning to ignore the noise of the children playing in the school quadrangle. In classical conditioning, an individual learns that when a professor holds the class card, he will call somebody to answer a question. In operant-conditioning, a human being learns that a response he makes will be followed by a particular consequence; for example, a young boy striking another classmate will be followed by a reprimand from their teacher. In social learning, people can learn from the experiences of others; for example, a young girl always says “thank you” whenever she receives something because she observes this from her mother, who serves as her model. Finally, cognitive processes is in learning assume that learning results from thinking and other mental processes.

Source: General Psychology Book by Pricila B. Dizon et.al.